Clay Schuette Felker (October 2, 1925 – July 1, 2008) was an American magazine editor and journalist who co-founded New York magazine in 1968 and California magazine (first known as New West) in 1976. He was known for bringing numerous journalists into the profession. The New York Times wrote in 1995, "Few journalists have left a more enduring imprint on late 20th-century journalism—an imprint that was unabashedly mimicked even as it was being mocked—than Clay Felker."
Early life
He was born in 1925 in Webster Groves, Missouri, son of Carl Felker, an editor of The Sporting News, and his wife, the former Cora Tyree, the former women's editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Both of Clay's parents, along with a grandfather and a grandmother, graduated from the University of Missouri School of Journalism.
In 1983, he founded the editorial board for the alumni publication Duke Magazine. He later worked for Time.
Felker gave Gloria Steinem what she later called her first "serious assignment", regarding contraception; he didn't like her first draft and had her re-write the article. After founding New York in 1968, one of his first features was Wolfe's coverage of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. Wolfe expanded this account into his non-fiction novel The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
New York became one of the most imitated magazines of its time, both from a design perspective and in the way it combined service and life-style articles. "He had the crass but revolutionary (revolutionary in the sense that it overthrew generations of class conceits) notion that you are what you buy. He sniffed the great consumer revolution with its social, political, and aesthetic implications. And New York Magazine became the first magazine to spell out where to get the goods (and at the best price)", wrote Michael Wolff about Felker in New York 35th anniversary issue.
Felker became editor-in-chief and publisher of The Village Voice in 1974; he resigned from New York following its hostile takeover by Rupert Murdoch in 1976.
In 1976, Felker founded New West as New Yorks sister publication covering the West Coast. It featured writers such as Wolfe, Joan Didion and Joe Eszterhas. By 1991, circulation had dropped to 250,000 and it was shut down. By 1990, Spy magazine portrayed Felker as out of touch with his former milieu and in charge of a series of money-losing journalistic enterprises.
Personal life
Felker was married three times:
- Leslie Blatt, a fellow Duke undergraduate, in 1949; they divorced, and she subsequently married John W. Aldridge, a literary critic, and later Charles Westoff, a Princeton University professor. She died November 9, 2014, in Palm Beach, Florida.
- Pamela Tiffin, an actress and fashion model, whom he married in 1962 and divorced in 1969. She died in 2020.
- Gail Sheehy, a writer, in 1984. By this marriage he had a daughter, Mohm Sheehy, whom Sheehy adopted from Cambodia, and a stepdaughter, Maura Sheehy Moss.